Facebook announces another news feed change

Published:11:14Friday 12 August 2016

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Just a few weeks after altering its news feed algorithms to give so-called “clickbait” stories less prominence, Facebook has announced more changes to the feed to give users more “personally informative” stories.

The idea is to create a new ranking system that helps push the stories most relevant to users to the top of their feeds, using data from what they view, like and comment on.

In a blog post announcing the latest changes, the social media giant said: One of our news feed values is that the stories in your feed should be informative.

“What makes someone feel informed about the world is personal. Something that one person finds informative may be different from what another person finds informative. This could be a news article on a current event, a story about your favorite celebrity, a piece of local news, a review of an upcoming movie, a recipe or anything that informs you.

“Today, we’re making an update — adding another of many signals we take into account when ranking feed — to do a better job of showing people stories that they find informative.”

In order to create this more personalised and relevant feed the Facebook team first uses its Feed Quality Program, where tens of thousands of survey subjects rank stories on how informative they are, to assess the quality of a story. Then they judge how relevant a story might be to an individual user, taking into account things such as what you comment on, like or share as well as your relationship with the story’s publisher.

At the end of all this ranking and comparing, Facebook says, you should be presented with the most relevant stories to you at the top of your news feed.

The company says that the move will create an even more personalised experience for users and one which will most likely change over time, depending on users’ responses to the stories they see.

The new rankings aren’t expected to have a major impact, with developers commenting: “We anticipate that most pages won’t see any significant changes to their distribution in news feed. Some pages might see a small increase in referral traffic, and some pages might see minor decreases.”